CONGRESS OPENS TO TRANSFER POWER IN CHINA

Tightly controlled event has Chinese envious of U.S.

China’s ruling Communist Party opened a congress today to usher in a new group of younger leaders faced with the challenging tasks of righting a flagging economy and meeting public calls for better government.

The weeklong congress starts a carefully choreographed but still fraught power transfer in which President Hu Jintao and most of the senior leadership will begin to relinquish office to a new slate of leaders for the coming decade headed by the appointed heir, Vice President Xi Jinping.

Delegates filed into Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, bedecked with red banners, and the congress was declared open after the national anthem played. The 2,268 delegates are drawn from the 82 million-member party where the real deal-making is done by a few dozen power-brokers behind the scenes, even as China is ever more connected to the world through trade and the Internet.

“We are faced with unprecedented opportunities for developments as well as risks. The party must keep in mind the trust of the people,” Hu said in a speech aimed at summarizing successes of the past five years and outlining challenges for the future. “The fight against corruption remains a serious challenge for us.”

Coming so soon after President Barack Obama’s re-election in the United States, the congress has drawn unfavorable comparisons from politically minded Chinese who have bemoaned how little direct influence they have in choosing their leaders.

“I am doing nothing but staring at the television before Obama gets re-elected. As for China’s party congress, there is no need for me to worry. On the contrary, it would be a waste of my time,” Xu Xiaoping, a celebrity entrepreneur who cofounded a successful chain of English language cram schools, said on a Chinese version of Twitter where he has 6 million followers.

To many Chinese, China is at an inflection point. Its old model of heavily state-directed growth that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and made China an economic powerhouse is sputtering in the face of rising domestic debt and a weak global economy. Meanwhile, the government has to contend with the public’s continued expectations of higher living standards and for less corruption and greater accountability, if not outright democracy.

In Tiananmen Square, adjacent to the congress venue, a woman in her 30s threw pieces of torn paper into the air and shouted “bandits and robbers!” in the early morning before she was taken away by security forces.

On the eve of the congress, four ethnic Tibetans in Sichuan province set themselves on fire in protests against Chinese rule of Tibetan areas, London-based rights group Free Tibet said, adding that the timing of the protests appeared aimed at sending a signal to the Chinese leadership.